On the play

Of all the things I've learned from playing Magic, two lessons stand out:
1. The perfect game is not made of one big perfect play. It is made up of small good plays that accumulate into one perfect game.
2. Play to get lucky. Don't dig yourself into a hole, play in such a way that if/when your winning ace comes your way, you're in a position to win. Even though you might be missing something, making bad plays and bad decisions, don't let it affect your future plays and decisions. Play through it. Things might not be going your way right now, but that's not an excuse to not do the right thing. Keep your head in the game, and you might just crawl back and win it.

On life and living

In the old days, the Greeks didn't have obituaries. When another of them passed away, they only asked one question: Did he have passion? If he had passion, then he had truly lived.

How about you? Do you have passion? Are you truly alive?

On having two left feet

People make mistakes. It's natural. We miscalculate, and some things go wrong.

When these things happen, the best thing to do is fix it. It's not the time for finger pointing - it just wastes time and doesn't help in anything. Recover, identify and fix the problem. After all's well and done, that's the only time when you analyze why the problem occurred, so that next time it (hopefully) won't happen again.

The important thing is to NEVER LOSE COMPOSURE. Or at least, don't lose it all. Panic and anxiety won't bring you closer to solving anything.

Delayed Gratification

In our Psychology of Learning class, we talked about rewards. Rewards are anything that can make a person happy, like food or money or whatever. And as you could imagine, rewards are used to encourage certain behaviors, like studying or exercise or whatever. More specifically, we talked about the difference in getting a smaller reward sooner and a larger reward later.

More often than not, the larger reward definitely is worth more than the smaller reward. Obvious, isn't it? But, more often than not, people take the smaller sooner reward over the later larger reward. Why? Because it's there. Getting something right now is easier and more certain than getting something later. This piece of candy, for example, is here right now but the 5 pieces of candy promised to you tomorrow might not be there. If you look closely, this behavior is counter-intuitive. Why would people settle for less when they can strive for more?

So the dilemma now is, do you get the smaller sooner reward or the later larger reward? Ask yourself this: Is your will strong enough? Are you in total control of your instincts? Be a real human, and overcome yourself. Think. What's worth more?

On Sickness and on Health

I know you want to push yourself, want to reachwhat you aim for, and do everything in your power to get what you want.

But.

There's a fine line between pushing yourself to the limit and crossing that limit and killing yourself.